Individuals, not Corporations, Deserve Liberty

A tremendous article from Edward Harrison.  He takes to task those faux libertarians and conservatives who defend corporate rights as "liberty."

A corporation has no inalienable or natural rights. Nevertheless, it is the fact that corporations represent a group of individuals that allows the 'corporatist' to claim that these fictional legal entities should enjoy the same natural and legal liberties and rights with which individuals are born.

Let me be bold here: The 'Corporatist' is a kleptocrat masquerading as a believer in liberty. He uses terminology based in liberty to construct an ideology solely as a means of furthering the gains of a specific strata of society allied with the corporatist and at the expense of other strata, by coercion if necessary.

Remember my post on kleptocracy from 2008? If not, here are the four methods Jared Diamond says ruling elites use to maintain power:

1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
2. Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular ways.
3. Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence. This is potentially a big and underappreciated advantage of centralized societies over noncentralized ones.
4. The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy.

This is the corporatism, the faux Libertarianism, to which I refer. The logic goes like this:

1. Individuals have inalienable rights to freedom. This is a fundamental right that all individuals have and efforts by government to undermine these rights must be resisted at all costs.
2. Corporations are groups of individuals which have banded together for mutual benefit. In so doing, they can express their individual natural rights more effectively than they could as individuals.
3. As such, corporations must retain the same rights as individuals legally in order to allow those individuals the corporation represents to express there natural rights. Therefore, the same resistance to denying the rights of individuals must also be transferred to the corporations which represent them.

This logic will take you much further in furthering the aims of corporations, the point being that corporations, businesses, should enjoy the same rights that individuals have.

That is not to say that businesses should not have rights. They should; and we should grant them as much liberty as is reasonable and warranted. But let's be clear, corporations are not individuals; they are collections of individuals. Often, individuals hide behind this collective using the corporate veil to shield themselves from sanction for behaviour that abuses individual liberties. In a very real sense, the rights and liberties of businesses and individuals often come into conflict. A real libertarian would always favour the individual in that conflict. A corporatist would favour the corporation. That's the difference.

(emphasis in original)